The present invention describes systems and methods for keyboardless text entry on a display for a wide variety of consumer electronic devices such as TVs, PCs, touch screens and interactive kiosks.
Technologies associated with the communication of information have evolved rapidly over the last several decades. Television, cellular telephony, the Internet and optical communication techniques (to name just a few things) combine to inundate consumers with available information and entertainment options. As the amount of information available increases, the need to access and use this data has grown. Not only the overall amount of information available to the consumer has grown, but the variety of devices that are interactive, such as, PCs, TVs, and PDAs, have also grown. To easily enter alphanumeric data, keyboards are typically used on PCs a legacy of the typewriter. However, as more and different types of interactive devices become available to consumers, a keyboard is not always the best method of interaction. For example, keyboards suffer the drawbacks of being relatively large, costly, and requiring more skill to use efficiently than many remote control devices. To solve this problem, methods of keyboardless text entry have been created.
One example of keyboardless text entry is a touch screen where an image of a standard (i.e. QWERTY) keyboard is displayed on the screen. This solution benefits from providing a familiar layout for users and removing a physical keyboard, but suffers from other drawbacks. For example, the user's hands may obscure displayed outputs as he or she enters text by touching keys displayed on the virtual keyboard.
Another example of keyboardless text entry is a system where keystrokes are drawn with a stylus on a touch pad. These drawn keystrokes are then translated into alphanumeric characters and displayed. Some drawbacks associated with this method are the need to enter multiple keystrokes for some of the characters, and the need to learn the strokes that match each character. Yet another method of keyboardless text entry is entering text using a voice recognition device (as described, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 6,629,077). In this method a voice input is matched to a voice command template and if a valid input is received, a corresponding character is input to a consumer electronic device. Drawbacks associated with this method include a lack of robustness in a noisy environment and the potential for extensive training of detection software.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide keyboardless text entry systems and methods which minimize or avoid the drawbacks associated with the keyboardless text entry systems described above.